Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen Read Free Book Online Page A

sense.
    Joe appears in the doorway. “Flag’s up,” he growls.
    Charlie drops his shovel and heads for the door.
    “What’s going on? Where are you going?” I say.
    “The cookhouse flag’s up.”
    I shake my head. “I’m sorry, I still don’t understand.”
    “Chow,” he says.
    Now that I understand. I, too, drop my shovel.
    Canvas tents have popped up like mushrooms, although the largest one—obviously the big top—still lies flat on the ground. Men stand over its seams, bending at the waist and lacing its pieces together. Towering wooden poles stick up through its center line, already flying Old Glory. With the rigging on the poles, it looks like the deck and mast of a sailboat.
    All around its perimeter, eight-man sledge teams pound in stakes at breakneck speed. By the time one sledge hits the stake, five others are in motion. The resulting noise is as regular as machine-gun fire, cutting through the rest of the din.
    Teams of men are also raising enormous poles. Charlie and I pass a group of ten throwing their combined weight against a single rope as a man off to the side chants, “Pull it, shake it, break it! Again—pull it, shake it, break it! Now downstake it!”
    The cookhouse couldn’t be more obvious—never mind the orange and blue flag, the boiler belching in the background, or the stream of people heading for it. The smell of food hits me like a cannonball in the gut. I haven’t eaten since the day before yesterday, and my stomach twists with hunger.
    The sidewalls of the cookhouse have been raised to allow for a draft, but it is divided down the center by a curtain. The tables on this side are graced with red and white checked tablecloths, silverware, and vases of flowers. This seems wildly out of sync with the line of filthy men snaking behind the steam tables.
    “My God,” I say to Charlie as we take our place in line. “Look at this spread.”
    There are hash browns, sausages, and heaping baskets of thickly sliced bread. Spiral cut ham, eggs cooked every which way, jam in pots, bowls of oranges.
    “This ain’t nothin’,” he says. “Big Bertha’s got all this, and waiters, too. You just sit at your table and they bring it right to you.”
    “Big Bertha?”
    “Ringling,” he says.
    “You worked for them?”
    “Uh . . . no,” he says sheepishly. “But I know people who have!”
    I grab a plate and scoop up a mountain of potatoes, eggs, and sausages, trying to keep from looking desperate. The scent is overwhelming. I open my mouth, inhaling deeply—it’s like manna from heaven. It is manna from heaven.
    Camel appears from nowhere. “Here. Give this here to that fella there, at the end of the line,” he says, pressing a ticket into my free hand.
    The man at the end of the line sits in a folding chair, looking out from under the brim of a bent fedora. I hold out the ticket. He looks up at me, arms crossed firmly in front of him.
    “Department?” he says.
    “I beg your pardon?” I say.
    “What’s your department?”
    “Uh . . . I’m not sure,” I say. “I’ve been mucking out stock cars all morning.”
    “That don’t tell me nothin’,” he says, continuing to ignore my ticket. “That could be ring stock, baggage stock, or menagerie. So which is it?”
    I don’t answer. I’m pretty sure Camel mentioned at least a couple of those, but I don’t remember the specifics.
    “If you don’t know your department, you ain’t on the show,” the man says. “So, who the hell are you?”
    “Everything okay, Ezra?” says Camel, coming up behind me.
    “No it ain’t. I got me some smart-ass rube trying to filch breakfast from the show,” says Ezra, spitting on the ground.
    “He ain’t no rube,” says Camel. “He’s a First of May and he’s with me.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah.”
    The man flicks the brim of his hat up and checks me out, head to toe. He pauses a few beats longer and then says, “All right, Camel. If you’re vouching for him, I reckon that’s